In industrial methods for fabricating and packaging flexible pouches made of multilayer plastics material (also known as “sachets” or “doypacks”) for the purpose specifically of containing foodstuffs for humans or pets, the flexible pouches are initially bulk-sterilized, and they then need to be thoroughly dried before final packaging in containers.
According to known methods, the flexible pouches are bulk-sterilized in perforated racks that are stacked on one another. After being sterilized, the pouches are then transferred onto a conveyor belt by passing them through a dryer, and they are once more transferred in order to be taken to final packaging.
Nevertheless, such a method involves multiple steps of manipulating the pouches, and thus multiple operations of an operator or a machine picking them up and then putting them down, which is penalizing in terms of efficiency and reliability. Such multiple manipulations lead to high risks of the flexible pouches being degraded, thereby reducing the overall efficiency of a production line.
The present disclosure thus seeks to propose an at least partial solution to these problems.